


Five Times Dr. Maru Faced Wonder Woman (And One Time She Didn't)

by psocoptera



Category: Wonder Woman (2017)
Genre: 5 Things, Ambiguous/Open Ending, F/F, Supervillainry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-20
Updated: 2017-11-20
Packaged: 2019-02-04 14:54:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,152
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12773406
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/psocoptera/pseuds/psocoptera
Summary: The first time Dr. Maru sees the god-woman, she doesn't expect to survive.





	Five Times Dr. Maru Faced Wonder Woman (And One Time She Didn't)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lilacsigil](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lilacsigil/gifts).



> Happy Yuletide! I was so excited to get to write this for you! The movie was such a delight and Doctor Maru is such a fascinating character.
> 
> Many thanks to my wonderful beta Carpenter who made this story stronger, except for the things I refused to change and are not her fault at all. :)

1\. Semele

The first time Dr. Maru sees the god-woman, she doesn't expect to survive. The woman has power - _is_ power - unlike anything Dr. Maru has ever seen, and she has made no preparations that could save her. Even when the woman spares her, she can't believe she will live - power like that isn't _harmless_ , isn't _safe_. That strength, that energy - Dr. Maru can only imagine what unknown forces might emanate from her body. As she scrambles away, she expects to blister; as she flees the base she expects to sicken. After she survives the first night her fear eases a little, although she still checks herself compulsively, wondering if her skin will discolor or her wits will dull. But nothing happens, nothing that can't be explained by exhaustion, hunger, and desperate flight. Her wits remain sharp. Her skin is filthy, but undamaged. Her blood, when she finally gets to a microscope, appears normal.

After a month of this, she concludes she is unaffected, and is disgusted by her stupid fear. The woman had had allies; she couldn't have been toxic in her mere presence. (And she had had allies; they must have seen her power before, she couldn't have shielded it from them entirely. Men don't follow women who don't show their power.) The god-woman is not so mighty that mortals cannot even look upon her. And if she can be faced, she can be defeated.

2\. Actaeon

Dr. Maru makes a weapon. A _Flammenwerfer_ , a flamethrower, except instead of petrol the fuel it shoots is sticky, a variant on Greek fire, designed to stick to skin and burn mercilessly. A weapon that will be indifferent to strength, an incendiary that electricity will only ignite to burn harder.

She's heard that the god-woman is working in the fields in Belgium, finding and clearing unexploded munitions. It's a pathetic use for her strength, but of course it must be hard for her allies to trust her, when she is so far beyond them; perhaps she needs to show that she can be yoked.

Or perhaps the dregs of an intelligence network that Dr. Maru has been able to cobble back together are lying to her, without Ludendorff behind her. She doesn't think so, though. They're still scared of her, she still has that much.

She makes her way to Ypres, in a stolen ambulance, of all things, the sticky-fire thrower stowed in the back. It's plowing and planting season and the fields she drives by seem to be full of entire families, women and children and bent old men. She's painted over the crosses but people still try to flag her down constantly, recognizing the shape of the ambulance; she can hardly stop near anyone at all, with the whole country full of the sick and the maimed. With a scarf around her face, she supposes she passes for one of them. But she is still more, and she will prove it.

It's evening when she reaches the village where her contact has told her she can find the woman they're calling "miracle-woman" and "angel". Dr. Maru has never believed in angels but she feels ready to test them and defy them just like this god-woman, if angels came to earth. She drives right into the center of the village where the peasants have set up long tables and are eating all together, so everyone can adulate the woman, maybe. The woman isn't even wearing armor, and she doesn't have any weapons in sight. Dr. Maru opens fire.

The first thing she realizes is that the god-woman is _fast_ , faster than Dr. Maru's own reflexes, which can snatch an open beaker from under a falling droplet. The fire-thrower has good range but insufficient velocity for how quickly the woman can dodge. The second thing she realizes is that the peasants aren't going to run away while their angel is attacked. The threat of the fire holds back the hoes and pitchforks but she hears shouts about guns and rooftops. Easy enough to set some rooftops on fire, distracting the peasants, and the god-woman, too, until suddenly she's right there, smashing the barrel of the weapon and wrapping her hand around Dr. Maru's throat.

"How do you put it out," the woman says.

Dr. Maru smiles - the woman has realized that water doesn't work, then. Dr. Maru should be scared, she's failed and the woman may be about to kill her - but all she feels is satisfaction that she's frustrated her at least this much.

"The war is over," the woman says. "Why have you done this."

"What are you?" Dr. Maru asks. The woman blinks. She's very beautiful, Dr. Maru can't help but notice, this close up. Her skin is flawless.

"I am a protector," the woman says. "What are you?"

Some peasant screams something, and the woman drops her and bounds away, and Dr. Maru barely makes it behind the wheel and out of the village, pursued by a baying mob of peasants, the ones not occupied with the spreading flames.

3\. Arachne

So that was a failure. She had acted too hastily, Dr. Maru concludes. It's been a problem her whole life since she was a little girl running towards fires and stealing her mother's matches from the kitchen. It's hard to know that someone as bright and blazing as the god-woman is out there and to be here, instead, hiding in a secret lab in a dank castle basement. Dr. Maru wants to understand her, to take her apart, to hold her in her hand and control her. The sticky fire had been a terrible plan - what if Dr. Maru _had_ killed her? Maybe her power would have gone out and Dr. Maru wouldn't be any closer to knowing how to recreate it.

She starts working on a very different sort of weapon. Sticky, again, but this time more like a glue - or, no, like a foam, a super-adhesive, rapidly expanding, rapidly hardening foam. The woman needs leverage to use her strength. Trap her in a foam bomb, immobilize her, and Dr. Maru will be able to study her, at least for a little while. She's clearly too dangerous to leave alive for long, but even a short observation... a few simple tests...

It's harder to learn where the woman can be found, this time. Maybe she's learned that standing out makes you a target. Maybe she's learned that power inevitably brings destruction to those around you, even if you can't be touched directly. Some of Dr. Maru's experiments while developing her foam had reminded her of making taffy and meringues with her mother when she was very small, before her mother was afraid of her. She tries not to think about her - her mother being afraid hadn't saved her when other people became afraid too. It is a quietly compelling thought, though, that the god-woman, too, might have learned the wisdom of solitude.

In the end Dr. Maru challenges her. Threatens downtown Vienna, poison gas, ticking clock - it's pretty much a bluff, she doesn't have the resources to make gas in quantity. She's barely managed to scrape together what she needs for the foam bombs, and that only by dint of some truly embarrassing side work producing Bakelite jewelry and tableware for the Weimar market. So there's only a tiny bit of gas and she uses most of it in the fake "trial run" and nobody even dies, she thinks, but it still succeeds in drawing the god-woman out of whatever cover she's been lurking in the past few years.

The foam bombs go off brilliantly when the god-woman tries to defuse the gas "bomb", and, oh, it's beautiful, she's almost up to her neck in it, arms and legs and most of her torso stuck in the quickly setting foam. Dr. Maru is able to walk right up to her while she struggles.

"Isabel Maru," the god-woman says. She's shaking her head; she has the nerve to look more disappointed than worried.

She doesn't look a day older than she did in that Belgian village. Some of her long, gorgeous hair has gotten trapped in the hardening foam; Dr. Maru feels unexpectedly sad about that.

"How did you become a god," Dr. Maru asks.

"I was brought to life by Zeus," the god-woman says. "It is not a power humans can claim."

"I've been told what is outside my power before," Dr. Maru says, and the god-woman sighs.

"You could do so much," she says. "Ares doesn't lean over your shoulder now, you could choose better than this."

"You don't like my work?" Dr. Maru asks, making a little move towards the fake bomb where it sticks out of the foam, like there might really be some gas in there she could release. She's not even wearing a mask so she doesn't expect the god-woman to take it seriously, but she does, slamming herself forward inside the mass of the cured foam, which shakes ominously and starts to crack.

Dr. Maru should get out of there, or, really, she should draw her sidearm and see what a bullet at point-blank range can do. Maybe she can end this impossible being and be free of her obsession with her.

Instead, inexplicably, she removes one of her gloves ( _why?_ ) and cups the god-woman's face in her hand.

It's been a long time since Dr. Maru touched another person, but she thinks the god-woman feels warmer than a regular person, and a little tingly, like something inside her is vibrating high above audible sound. The god-woman's eyes are big and dark and they widen a little when Dr. Maru touches her face.

"I thought Zeus swallowed his best daughters," Dr. Maru says, which is inaccurate, and inane, but all she can think of to say.

"I am the daughter of the Amazons," the god-woman says in her low, calm voice, and then she flexes - Dr. Maru can see it in her shoulders - and more cracks run down through the foam.

Dr. Maru turns and runs - she has a good escape plan this time, she's finally gotten better about that - and doesn't look back, even when she hears the god-woman call her name behind her.

4\. Outis

After Vienna, Dr. Maru is furious with herself, and destroys half her lab in her anger and humiliation. She had had the god-woman there captive, and wasted it on a few stupid questions? She could have tried to get a blood sample! She'd had a lancet ready in her pocket. She could have pressed an electrometer to her skin instead of her useless hand. The photographic plate in her other pocket is unfogged, at least, supporting the theory that the god-woman does not emit radiation of the radioactivity sort, so that's one piece of actual data Dr. Maru managed to collect. But it's pretty much the only one.

She's never been someone to be distracted by beauty. Chemical beauty, maybe - a perfect titration, a clever formulation, an elegant synthesis. Fire, controlled and uncontrolled. She liked the colors and sounds of fireworks even before she knew how to create them. But losing her wits over skin and eyes and hair? Beauty is a toxic emanation after all, and Dr. Maru had let it weaken her to the point of uselessness.

What she needs is careful, controlled exposure, and what she needs to study the god-woman is more than a few precarious minutes with her briefly immobilized. What she needs to do is sneak into the god-woman's territory, into a place she doesn't belong, like when that spy stole her notes. To do that, she grudgingly admits to herself, she's going to have to do something about her face.

She's always been too proud to pursue surgery, even late in the war when the surgeons had treated so many injured soldiers that they had new techniques to graft and reconstruct. So what if she has to puree most of her food and practice painful cleansings to avoid infection. She's had better things to think about than her face. And it would have been too risky, during the war, to go under someone else's knife - there was too much jealousy and fear of her to leave an opportunity like that.

The techniques are even better now, though. She experiments for a month or six, trying to find another solution, but there's nothing she can do with rubbers and resins that won't be obvious at close distance. And she's just too damn distinctive, with the scar. Disfigured men are common after the war but disfigured women are not. The god-woman is surely as keen to collect news of her as she is of the god-woman - or maybe she isn't - maybe the god-woman never thinks of her at all - but she had come, when Dr. Maru threatened Vienna. So that's something. Anyways, she must assume that the woman tries to cultivate intelligence sources that could track her, and so she must outwit them, and so Dr. Maru's face needs to disappear.

(She couldn't track every step of the god-woman's journey to Vienna, but she was noticed, a few times, crossing Europe. The earliest sighting was in London. Isabel will go to Britain, when she wears her new face, and hunt there.)

In the end, it takes a long time and a few quiet murders to find a surgeon she can trust, and then it takes multiple surgeries to reshape her face. It's a frustrating time when she can't work out of fear that fumes could damage the delicate, healing tissue. She falls back on earlier, lesser loves - classics, languages, the work that let her reconstruct Greek fire - and reads accounts of the Amazons by Diodorus and Strabo and various other fools, none of whom seem to be describing anybody who could produce someone like the god-woman.

She can't work in London, either - she has no credentials, and she doesn't want to draw attention to herself by purchasing the kinds of reagents she uses. She sweeps floors and keeps up with journals, quietly, in reading rooms where she doesn't belong, and seethes with resentment over experiments she can't try to replicate and lines of work she can't try to extend. She almost gives up. But there's nothing in any journal that can compare to the raw, superhuman power she witnessed all those years ago, and it's better to be on the trail of it than to be the great Dr. Maru. Eventually, she finds the tiniest thread of a lead, and, when she follows it, another. 

Espionage is the most tedious work she's ever done but she finally finds herself sitting in a ludicrously-named dormitory listening to featherbrained women gush about their fearless leader, Etta Candy, and her mysterious friend or possibly lover, Diana Prince, who, Isabel is 90% sure, is the god-woman.

Candy's operation, as far as Isabel (or Alice, as she's been calling herself) can tell, is a sort of unwieldy combination of a job-training center, a mutual aid society, and a lady Pinkertons. Women who are down on their luck are taken in, loaned a little cash for immediate needs, and taught some basic secretarial skills. Some of them are found job placements at that point, with the expectation that they'll pay off their loan to keep the thing rolling. Others, however, get invited to more advanced classes - self-defense, memorization techniques, phone tapping, pocket camera operation, codes and ciphers, knife fighting. These women are found very _specific_ secretarial jobs, and what they send back to Candy is not money but information. "Alice" doesn't technically know about any of this yet but Isabel questioned one of Candy's trainees under scopolamine and got the whole scoop. She has no idea whether the Alice persona will meet their criteria for recruitment, but that's okay - she's not really interested in Candy's business, except as it sheds light on Diana's pursuits.

So far she's learned that Candy is around most of the time, but Diana's appearances are shorter and more infrequent. Candy is the one to go to if you need papers or another loan - apparently even women who aren't in the special classes sometimes benefit from a bit of forgery, and everyone seems to know that Candy can produce this kind of thing. Diana is the one you ask if you want to get your things from your house if you're trying to leave a man who's been beating you, or you have a john who won't leave you alone (a number of the women seem to be ex-prostitutes), or you need someone to watch your kids. Everyone agrees she's a softy for children.

Isabel can't remember if there were any children in that village in Belgium, or if the god-woman had seemed particularly protective of them, but she notes it for possible future use.

She's also learned that both Candy and Diana like to sing, but Diana likes workers' anthems and Candy likes patriotic anthems and so they usually compromise on bawdy drinking songs. Candy cannot be enticed into amateur dramatics by any means, except at Christmas when she'll don a giant fake white beard to play Father Christmas for the children. Diana will cheerfully put on any costume you give her, but she never seems to have any idea what the role is supposed to be, and is inevitably just Diana in funny clothes no matter the part. Candy makes phenomenal toffee, Diana can't sew but will tie you wonderful ornamental knots if you give her a bit of silk cord.

A pile of useless nonsense, in other words. But it's interesting what they're _not_ saying - no one has mentioned seeing Diana fly, or lift automobiles, or play with lightning, which seems like the sorts of things anyone would find more memorable than song preferences.

Candy gets back on Isabel's second day in the dormitory and finds her promptly.

"Usually like to be here to welcome ladies to the Candy Dish," she twitters. "Sorry about that. Couldn't be helped. You're settling in alright?"

Isabel forces a smile - the left side of her face is mostly numb, but she has enough control to make it look like she's trying, and the effect is more like "may have suffered a palsy, poor thing" than "notorious villain obviously hiding behind facial surgery". Candy obligingly makes a sort of pitying wince and shuffles through her several candy dishes to offer Isabel a soft bonbon instead of a hard boiled sweet.

Isabel stays at the - ugh - _Candy Dish_ for another month, before she sees Diana, and it's the strangest time in her life by far. She's spending her days "learning" typing and shorthand (amusing herself by adapting it to other languages in her head), the rest of her time resisting the urge to hide in her room: she won't hear more about Diana there. So she participates in a bridge tournament, and a taffy pull, and a musical evening, although she just mouths along, she can't bring herself to actually sing.

She realizes that the women they recruit are not educated, but they're very sharp, very quick. That Candy, for all her sweetness, is a sort of lidless all-seeing eye who can't be bluffed at cards, who always knows who took the last of anything from the pantry, and who is probably doing something illegal with the London Stock Exchange given how closely she follows it. (Isabel gives up her plans to break into Diana's room - always kept for her, no matter how long between visits - because she's sure Candy would know before she got the door open.) She sees that the women talk so much because they're encouraged to be interested and curious, and because there are no men around to talk over them, which is deliberate, one of the old-timers tells her.

"Etta would never say so but I think she set it up like this for Diana," the woman tells her; Isabel is pretty sure she's one of the forgers, judging by the subtle staining on her fingertips. "The island she was princess of, Themiscyra, it was all women, she says."

"Does she talk about it much?" Isabel asks, trying to sound only normally curious.

"Nah," the woman says. "To the kids, sometimes, if they ask her things. Says it's wrong to lie to children. A lot of us have something we'd rather not talk about, nobody's too nosy here."

Isabel has never spent time around children - she has no idea how hard it would be to train a child to interrogate Diana by proxy. Candy seems unlikely to let it fly. Isabel has mostly tried to stay quiet, to keep her head down, although she's started to catch herself wondering what it would be like to be here for real, as herself. She could join in those arguments about how aeroplanes will change the world - she's sure she has a unique perspective. She could teach one of the secret classes, maybe. She could improve their taffy recipe.

She's washing up in the kitchen - there's a rota - when Diana turns up. Isabel has her back turned, she's at the sink, and she hears Etta come in, talking to someone, behind her. She hears the god-woman's unmistakeable voice answer.

"Yes, baseball," the god-woman says. Isabel has no idea of the context, but both women are laughing. She's never heard Diana laugh before.

The pan in Isabel's hands is clean, and she can't resist - she turns to hand it to the woman who's drying, and lets herself turn a little bit extra, to see Diana. She's wearing a red blouse and reaching into a bowl of fruit for a red apple, and as Isabel turns back to the sink and the next pan, she can hear the crunch of a juicy bite and a little mm of pleasure. She can picture the god-woman's teeth sinking into it.

"You and your fruit," Candy says, fondly, and Diana answers "You and your sweets" in a similar tone as they turn to leave the kitchen. Just as they must be passing out into the hallway, Isabel hears Diana ask, casually, "Who was that woman by the sink? Someone new?"

Isabel's heart pounds. Diana could easily have waited to ask until she was out of earshot - is she, what, warning Isabel? Giving her a chance to get away? Calmly, she puts down the pan she's picked up, asks the other dishwashers to excuse her for a moment, and takes off her apron. She walks steadily and deliberately into the hallway and right on out the back door of the building, never looking back, following her departure plan. There's nothing in her room that she needs, or that will tell them anything. She has second thoughts, as she vanishes into London - maybe she should have taken the risk, stayed for one meal, counted on Diana not killing her at the supper table. But she had never really belonged there, and she can't be surprised that Diana could tell.

5\. Heracles

Isabel has one lead, after all that work. But it's a good one. Diana was princess of an island of women, and it was called Themiscyra, like the Greek historians named the home of the Amazons. If that's the god-woman's origin, it may be the key to understanding her power.

So Isabel finds Themiscyra.

It takes years of work. Poring over charts of sea currents looking for anomalies; chasing rumors of legends and crumbling diaries in forgotten half-ransacked libraries and buying an ocean of liquor for tight-lipped Turkish fishermen.

At last, though, she motors her little boat through the impossible curtain and sees the island.

There are bows and spears trained on her long before she makes it to shore, but they let her land. The women who come down to meet her are armed and armored, and when they ask who she is and how she has found them, she forgets all of her prepared speeches.

"Is this really Diana's island?" she asks, and their eyes go wide.

Isabel's hands are bound and she is marched up a long, weary trail to the city on the cliff. She is given water and then she is tied to a chair. A bowl of burning herbs is placed at her feet - someone says something about the gifts of Hestia and honesty. And then the questions start.

The smoke makes Isabel hazy and confused. Sometimes she finds herself in the middle of a sentence, with no idea what she's been saying. She thinks she talks about her mother; she thinks she talks about the gas. Sometimes she can't remember if she's trying to talk about Diana or trying not to talk about Diana. They give her more water, sometimes, when her mouth is dry.

And then someone pokes her with the tip of a spear, and she wakes up. Her neck hurts from sleeping in the chair. She's not tied any more. A woman in a fur-edged cape, who she thinks was one of her questioners, tells her to get up and follow her.

They walk out into blazing sunlight. Isabel blinks and has to squint, the light hurts her eyes. They questioned her all night, she thinks.

She follows the woman to a low wall, to the edge of the cliff. There are rocks at the bottom far below.

"We have heard your story," the woman says, "And judged you, and you will die for your crimes. But because you bring me news of my daughter, I will grant you the choice of how. The sword, or hemlock, or you may jump, here."

Isabel looks back at the women who have followed them; several of them are armed with swords, and she wonders if she makes that choice if her sentence will be carried out right here, right now. She doesn't see anyone carrying a cup.

"Wait," she says. She feels weirdly calm. "If you have to kill me, then kill me, but please, answer my questions about Diana first."

The woman - the queen, she must be - frowns. "What good will that do you," she says. "We will never let you go to attack her again."

"I know," Isabel says, and she does. The Amazons might have let one fishing-boat sail away, once, that never landed on the island; they might have let one merchant-woman go home to her daughter, with one sailor to help her, when they killed the rest of her crew. Isabel has never deluded herself that they were going to make a similar exception for her. It's still better to be here, reaching for what she thirsts for, than out in the world abandoning her quest. 

"I just want to know," she says. "I just want to know, then you can kill me."

The queen raises her eyebrows. "Hmm," she says. She gestures, and a woman steps forward and hands her a bow and an arrow.

Isabel wonders if she's about to be executed - "arrow" hadn't been on the original list - but the queen sights and shoots out over the cliff, far out into the water, much farther than it seems an arrow should be able to fly.

"Find my arrow," the queen says. "Retrieve it and deliver it to the top of our sacred mountain, there." She turns and gestures behind her, at one of the peaks that rise above the city. "Do this, little Achlys, and I will answer your questions before you die."

"Labours," Isabel says. "Ah." She looks at the water, at the mountain, starting to calculate.

The queen smiles a wintry smile. "You may not set foot on the mountain," she adds.

"May I set foot in the water - I mean, may I enter the water?" Isabel asks.

The queen nods. "It is deeper than you can dive."

"Obviously," Isabel snaps. The queen is curious enough about her science to want to see what she can do with it - she's not going to set her tasks she could do without it. "May I live among you while I attempt it? May I ask for aid and materials?"

"You are bold," the queen says. "Do not think that you can brew up poison for us."

It's been so long since Isabel has pursued mass death as her goal that it almost feels like another life. "Your deaths would not answer my questions," she says, and the queen smiles again.

The Amazons do give her aid and materials - most principally, what they give her is a team of women who are simultaneously her guards, her supervisors, and her apprentices. There is a metalsmith, a glassworker, a herbalist, and a soap-maker; it's a little frightening how thoroughly the queen has understood her work just from asking her questions while she was drugged.

It's not easy to jump the Amazons' technology three thousand years forward, of course. She takes apart and utilizes every piece of her boat's engine, and everything useful she has with her - a camera, a small medical kit, a telescope, the boat itself, her clothes and shoes. She needs tanks, potash, a way to compress air, to produce oxygen, to make fuel, to make nozzles...

She's surprised by how much she likes living with the Amazons. Any single one of them could kill her, effortlessly, at any time - this is paradoxically freeing, because she doesn't have to scheme and maneuver to survive the attack when it comes. She won't, if it does, so she doesn't have to worry about it. Her guard-apprentices ask smart questions and contribute clever ideas and seem to think it's perfectly reasonable when she wants to pursue some line of work until dawn or thinks up some irresistible idea in the middle of the night. The Amazons in general eat well and dance a lot and don't mind that she watches. She tells them about her real face and they agree it's a shame she had to give up her scar - the Amazons understand about scars. But also about necessity. They exhaust her memory, over the years, of every single scrap of history, science, or literature that she ever learned.

They tell her about Diana, too. She thinks Hippolyta has forbidden them to answer any questions about her, but not to _ask_ questions, and so she tells her stories over and over again, the village, the sticky foam, the apple. They want to hear every detail Isabel can recall about the epic battle when she first saw Diana - and someone tells her, after one of those stories, who they think Diana was fighting. What she was created to do.

Isabel has always believed Diana was something _other_ but it's still strange to hear about the Greek gods as real presences in these women's stories. Her guards take her to see a stone cliff where Diana punched in handholds to climb and a giant mosaic the queen commissioned showing scenes from Diana's childhood, including Zeus giving the spark of life to the clay infant held by the queen. There are statues, too, of Diana as a child, as a young woman, as a warrior the day she left; she's apparently a favorite subject for art now that she's gone. Sometimes Isabel goes and sits in front of the warrior statue and wonders what Diana would think of her being here, in her childhood home. If she would agree with the queen's stay of her execution. If she would let Isabel watch her dance.

1941 days after Isabel steps ashore on Themiscyra, she retrieves the queen's arrow from the bottom of the sea, on her third dive to successfully reach the bottom. She makes it back to the surface without caisson disease, without rapture of the deep, without oxygen poisoning, without any of the carefully-made components of the rebreather apparatus failing. 92 days later, she fires a rocket containing the arrow at the peak of the sacred mountain. The queen herself goes up to inspect where it has landed. Not _quite_ at the summit, one of her guards tells her later, but past the line that they consider the top, ritually speaking.

"You may ask me your questions," Hippolyta says, when she's returned.

"Tell me everything," Isabel says. "I just... I want to hear all about her."

Hippolyta smiles, and sighs. "You are the only person on this island who didn't see her grow up," she says. "I haven't had anyone to tell stories to since she left."

"I want to hear them all," Isabel says. "And I'll tell you, again, everything I know about what she did out there, right up to the last time I saw her."

Neither of them mention an execution. Isabel understands, now, that her life will seem mayfly-brief to Hippolyta; maybe it's easy enough for her to wait for time to carry out the sentence. Or maybe Hippolyta just doesn't want to give up the slight connection with her lost daughter that Isabel can offer.

6\. Medusa.

Isabel has lived on Themiscyra for more than ten years when Diana lands in the invisible aeroplane. She doesn't know how long exactly; she lost count some time after the business with the arrow. It's hard to tell time by the seasons and the stars, Isabel never knew much astronomy but she doesn't think the stars move quite like they're supposed to here.

Of course the entire city rushes down to the field where Diana lands. Isabel isn't guarded any more, but her apprentices are doing interesting work trying to develop a way to counter seismic sea waves, one of the few phenomena that can threaten Themiscyra, with underwater explosives, so she usually spends her time with them when she's not with the queen. (She doesn't think it's going to work, but it's interesting.) When they drop their styluses and run to see what's happening, Isabel stays behind. If there's going to be fighting, she's better off out of the way. If it's Diana, like she hears a few people yelling... well. She doesn't need to intrude on Diana's homecoming.

Isabel can't really miss what's going on; there are gongs, and horns, and banners going up all over the city, and one of her apprentices comes in to tell her all about it in case she somehow hasn't noticed all that. (It's the Amazon who likes to drink and say she's going to fight Poseidon. Isabel can't help but think of her as hopelessly young, even though she must be millennia older than Isabel herself.) Diana has returned, in an amazing contraption, and the feast in her honor is going to be the biggest party Themiscyra has ever seen.

Isabel nods and tries to look very busy with her ongoing study of Themiscyra's glowing blue spring water. It's too much to hope that nobody will tell Diana that she's there, but maybe Diana won't bother to come see this uninvited footnote from her time away.

Eventually she gives up on the glowing water. It's sunset when Diana finds her; she's sitting on the wall by the cliff, where Hippolyta had offered her the choice to jump.

"Isabel," she hears Diana say behind her, after a sound that can only be Diana landing from a flight. Isabel doesn't turn and look.

"My mother told me how you came here," Diana says. "It's been a long time since the Candy Dish."

Isabel doesn't answer.

"I never understood what you came there to do," Diana says. "We tested everything, there was nothing - but you left as soon as you saw me."

"As soon as _you_ saw _me_ ," Isabel says, despite herself. It's pointless not to respond: if Diana really wants answers, she'll wrap Isabel in the Lasso of Hestia, Isabel knows all about that now.

"My mother says you have behaved honorably here," Diana says. She's closer behind Isabel now, just a few steps behind her, it sounds like. "I think you broke out of Ares' shadow after all."

"I will never be a plowshare," Isabel says bitterly. "Don't try to make me into something I'm not."

"You've lived here so long," Diana says, right behind her. "Do you really think this is a place we don't value swords?"

"Hide Achilles among the Amazons and you never find him," Isabel says, trying to make her voice light.

Diana puts her hand on her shoulder. "Isabel," she says. "Won't you turn around and look at me?"

"I can't," Isabel whispers. If she tries to meet Diana's eyes, she's going to turn to stone. She might be stone already; she might be vitrified, she might be glass now, if she moves she might shatter. Diana's hand is so warm on her shoulder, and her skin buzzes where Diana is touching.

"I want to know who you are," Diana whispers. Isabel can feel her breath on her ear. Slowly, Diana wraps her other arm around Isabel, until her hands are clasped on Isabel's shoulder, and slowly, minutely, Isabel lets herself lean back.

**Author's Note:**

> 1918 is rather early for Dr. Maru to have a concept of radiation poisoning, but she's Dr. Poison, she might not know how to harness it but she's ahead of the curve on harmful effects. Napalm in the spring of 1919? Ditto. The foam trap is particularly ahistorical - they had spray concrete before WWI and foam rubber in 1929 but riot control foam seems to be more of a perpetually-five-years-from-now sort of invention. Plastic surgery really does leap forward during WWI to help disfigured soldiers. People start using scuba rebreathers in the late 19th century, although the early systems couldn't go very deep. Goddard has done a bunch of rocketry work by the 1920s. The French inventor Yves Le Prieur worked on both rocket launchers during WWI and scuba systems afterwards.
> 
> The section titles all refer to people from Greek mythology who interacted with the gods - Semele was tricked into asking to see Zeus in his glory and got incinerated, Actaeon spied on Artemis and got torn apart, Arachne challenged Athena and got transformed, Outis, "Nobody", is the name Odysseus gave the Cyclops in his cave, Heracles got assigned his famous labors as penance for killing his children. Medusa breaks the pattern by being the monster rather than the human. Fun Medusa fact I couldn't use: in some versions of the story, droplets of her blood turn into poisonous vipers. Achlys, which Hippolyta calls Isabel, was the Greek personification of misery and goddess of poisons. Achilles was disguised as a girl to hide from the Trojan War but Odysseus finds him because he can't resist picking up a weapon instead of clothes and jewelry like the other girls.
> 
> I feel like fandom has mostly concluded that Dr. Maru does see Diana during the ballroom dance scene, but I'm not sure - Steve sees her over Dr. Maru's shoulder, Maru leaves in the other direction, we don't see her react to Diana dancing with Ludendorff. This is an AU where she doesn't notice her, I guess. Maybe she sees her in passing but is busy thinking about poison gas and never realizes the pretty lady in the blue dress is the woman she's obsessed with for the rest of her life.


End file.
